


The Phone Tree

by Anonymous



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Brock Rumlow is a dick, Canon-Typical Violence, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Extremely Dubious Consent, HYDRA Trash Party, HYDRA Trash Party leftovers, Humiliation, I cannot emphasize enough that this is not a nice fic, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Manipulation, Medical Procedures, Physical Abuse, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Psychological Horror, Psychological Torture, Stockholm Syndrome, this is dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-04-24
Packaged: 2019-04-26 15:17:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 19,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14404851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: HYDRA is all about order, and order must be enforced. Measures will be taken for whoever gets out of line.





	1. Chapter 1

Holman is so excited to finally see the soldier in action he can barely think about anything else.

He had joined HYDRA primarily for the tech. It was clear from the moment they tried to recruit him, barely a year after he had started working for SHIELD, that their labs would be able to give him access to technology that SHIELD never could, technology non-billionaires like him could never ordinarily have _dreamed_ of. Yes, there had been trials, and background checks, and hazings, and a few morally dubious oaths that he had to take, but so far, it had been worth it. His small amount of medical training—he’d dropped out of med school for funding reasons—quickly granted him access to divisions of the organization that all had euphemistic names like _Future_ and _Bright_ and _Improvement_ and _Solutions_. Everything in these divisions was shiny and professional, and as long as you didn’t think too much about what all this technology was _for_ , it was a lot of fun.

It was in one of those divisions that he had first heard about the soldier. First as a rumor, then as denials, and finally, years later, as a job offer.

The woman who was going to be his trainer had met up with him beforehand, shook his hand and asked if he’d studied all the files and manuals, and then started with the first of many, many warnings about what they were about to do. She was older, nearing retirement age by the looks of it, and looked just like a normal grandmother, which made him wonder how many other grandmothers he’d known had incredible secrets like hers. It had all been pretty cool.

They’d gotten into one of the elevators, going down, and she had used a voice-activated prompt to take them to a floor that wasn’t on any of the signs in that elevator, which was incredible because the building they were in right now _already wasn’t supposed to exist_ ; his family thought he worked in a bank. Then they went down a corridor, through a door that she unlocked with a retinal scan, and down _another_ corridor and into the room with the soldier.

He was lying on his back on a hospital bed, strapped down and so drugged out of his mind that he barely turned to look at them when they approached. His skin was freezing cold to the touch, and the whole scenario reminded Holman unpleasantly of practicing medical procedures on a cadaver. After about five minutes of his trainer lecturing Holman next to him, this very cold man had apparently gotten used to their presence: he slumped his head back against the bed, and gradually started drooling a little puddle onto the white sheet next to him.

After everything Holman had heard, it was disappointing, to say the least. Disappointing, and also strangely _upsetting_ , for reasons he chose not to dwell on at that moment. All he knew was that he felt heavy inside and almost embarrassed to be there, and had the sudden unexpected desire to turn and walk out.

That wasn’t an option, of course, so he had told himself that he was just there for the arm, not the man, and chose to concentrate only on that. His older colleague sat by the table in a padded chair and trained him, for hours, after lunch that day and well into the night, and Holman quickly forgot about the disappointment and the cold air in the room and the nurse anesthetist who kept coming in, every ten minutes, to check that the soldier was still sufficiently drugged.

“He goes through that stuff like candy,” his trainer had said, and she’d looked at the straps holding the man down, and Holman had looked at them too, and although they looked sturdy enough she had made a weird face.

Five minutes after that she had been palpating the soldier’s shoulder near the edge of the metal prosthesis, talking about the surgical procedures that had been indicated recently for dermal hypertrophy caused by his enhanced healing process, when the soldier had wrenched himself toward her and tried to bite her fingers. The restraints had jerked so violently that he could have sworn the whole bed moved, even though it was bolted to the floor.

Holman lurched backwards and almost pissed himself, but his new teacher barely reacted, just pressed a tiny button on her lapel, and the room was immediately flooded with people who jostled them away from the bed and went to work and stayed until the noise and thrashing faded to silence. After these people left, the soldier resumed drooling and she resumed what she’d been saying, only she spoke a bit faster now.

By the time he went home that night, that strange heavy feeling had crept in again, and he’d crawled into bed and tried to think about nothing so he could sleep, but he couldn’t because he kept thinking about those restraints and that cold silence, and the heaviness in his stomach made him feel sick.

A few days after that was his trial run, which to tell the truth was somewhat of a let-down too. The soldier was awake this time, yes, but he was busy talking to a bunch of men with guns who were also in the room, and hadn’t even seemed to notice the little geeky guy working on his arm. Holman wasn’t even able to listen in on anything interesting they were saying: he was too busy concentrating on the arm and on the fact that there weren’t any straps today. Ten minutes in he’d been sweating so much that he was sure one of the men was going to notice and laugh.

But nothing had happened: no one had been bitten or threatened or even looked at particularly rudely, and while that was technically a _good_ thing, it also meant that he had nothing to occupy his thoughts after a while, and had gone home that night feeling the same weird heaviness.

Still, his performance at the trial had been perfect, and he had looked forward to things getting better when he got another try. But then the soldier was suddenly gone, and no one mentioned him again for 18 months. His older colleague had retired—or at least he _hopes_ she had, because she had disappeared. The strange feeling, whatever it was, had long since faded to nothing, and after a while he stopped thinking about it at all. Other learning opportunities came up. Holman moved on.

Or at least he thought he had, until the offer for the mission came up and he was so excited he wanted to puke.

 

* * *

 

He learns early on that HYDRA sometimes borrows people from SHIELD STRIKE teams to do their own missions, and that those missions sometimes involve whole teams and that they often involve the soldier, and also that maybe, possibly, the same thing is an option in his _own_ future. It’s true that he doesn’t exactly have special forces experience, but he has medical and technical training, which he knows makes him valuable in the field—he can perform two jobs for the price of one. He’d made his willingness to go clear right from the start, and had even passed the required physical. But he never truly believes that he—a guy with glasses who always got picked last for team sports—could actually be _selected_. That stuff is for other men, bigger men who carry guns as casually as they carry cell phones and who don’t sweat buckets when they get near a scary robot arm.

So when the letter comes he thinks he is dreaming, that it might be some trick another division is playing on the techies.

“Is it true?” he says to the other man who has also arrived early in the room (they had called it a _briefing center_ or something like that, but really it is just a room). “Will I—” he stops; it seems too presumptuous—“will someone from tech really be going out there with everyone? With the soldier?”

“You won’t be going out there with _anyone_ ,” the man says with the exact amount of contempt that Holman had been expecting, which is a lot. “You’ll be sitting in the van with the driver and waiting for someone to bleed.”

 _Hm, that is disappointing_ , he thinks, but consoles himself with the thought that at least he will be going to an exotic location. These teams always seem to be heading to places so far-flung he hasn’t even heard of the _country_ , let alone the town.

“It’s in Georgia,” says the big man.

“The country?”

“The state.”

Oh, ok.

But then the others arrive, another team member and the commander, who is called Rumlow, and an older man in a suit who is there to help with the briefing. And the commander actually smiles at Holman, the type of smile you’d give someone at a job interview if you desperately wanted them to work for your company, and he feels better. Going anywhere at all with these people is still unimaginably badass, after all, so after Rumlow and the old guy have gone through the basics of the 48-hour mission that is going to happen next week, Holman picks up his pen and starts signing the first of the 200 or so consent forms that he must complete.

“How do you get away with using these STRIKE guys?” he asks the man in the suit between forms. “Don’t their bosses like, ask questions when they’re gone or if someone gets injured?”

“We own the bosses, too, kid,” the man says, and Holman decides once again that he has made the right choice.

He signs another form. For such a secretive organization, HYDRA sure loves their paperwork. He says something of the sort to the man in the suit, and then realizes that the comment is probably inappropriate, but the man doesn’t seem to mind.

“Got that from the Nazis,” he says. “The Germans love their paperwork.”

Holman signs another page and feels uncomfortable. He doesn’t like it when people mention that particular era in HYDRA’s history. It was so long ago that they’d been involved with the Nazis, after all. Is it really worse than say, working for Volkswagen?

“Hail HYDRA,” says the man in the suit when they are finished.

“Hail HYDRA,” he repeats, the way he always does, coughing the words out because they don’t sit well in his mouth.

 

* * *

 

They issue him a new wallet, with cash and fake cards and ID and even a photo of a girl to go in it (“Don’t forget her name,” says the woman who hands it out to him). He memorizes his fake story. He hands over his real wallet and ID and cell phone, and while he isn’t used to having much privacy in this job, he does feel naked without his real identity. Then he is given clothes and another form to sign and then _it is happening_ , he is on his way to the plane to meet the others, and when he arrives at the airstrip there is still a part of him that believes that it is all a trick, or a dream, and that feeling gets worse rather than better when he steps into the plane.

He is last on. It’s a small plane, an innocent-looking Gulfstream that looks like it originally held 18 passengers, although some of the seats have been removed. The inside is a lot nicer than he’d expected, but he supposes that’s just a nice part of being undercover. On one side of the aisle down the center of the plane are wide single seats: on the other side of the aisle, directly in front of him, are two rows with two seats each. These pairs of seats are turned to face each other, the way he has sometimes seen it set up on trains, so that the people on either side can talk to each other. On one of these turned-together seats is the guy from the briefing, the one who had told Holman that he was going to wait for people to bleed. He is even bigger than Holman remembers him, even though he is already sitting down, and even in civilian gear he looks out of place sitting in the comfortable leather. Next to him is another man, who is also big, but big in a way that Holman perhaps could be if he spent the next five years in the gym, not _impossibly_ big like the first man. But still big.

There’s another row of seats further up, closer to the cockpit, and that’s where Rumlow and the soldier must be sitting. He doesn’t want to look like he’s staring, though, and so he just quickly sits down in the row facing the other two men.

He had been told everyone’s names, of course, but with all the information that has been stuffed into his head he finds that he can’t remember.

“I remember you. The techie,” says the less-huge guy.

“Holman,” he says. “Nice to meet you.” Then he feels stupid, because they’d already met.

“Abrams,” he says. The other man (Kohler, he remembers now, the second in command, although the first name was still gone from his head) completely ignores him. Abrams makes a comment about how this flight will at least be shorter than most, and Holman smiles politely, but can’t think of anything else to say, and soon after that the plane takes off and neither one of them says anything else to him for the rest of the trip.

Instead, the two other men talk to each other. They aren’t _excluding_ Holman, exactly, but they seem to have worked with each other for years, and the subjects they discuss are close to impenetrable. A lot of sports talk, as well. Holman should have memorized some sports stuff so he’d have something to talk about. It’s awkward to be sitting like this without anyone talking to him, and he still has barely seen the soldier.

He undoes his seatbelt, and stands up to move across the aisle to the row of single seats. He is prepared to give an excuse about the view being better or the location being better for sleeping in, but nobody asks. From here he can mostly just see Rumlow, who is in the aisle seat. He has a good view of the baton Rumlow has holstered on his hip: a modified version of the TASER rods SHIELD uses. He has only seen them in action once, when they’d tested them out on a slab of beef in the lab. (At least, he’d assumed it was a slab of beef.) One of his dumber coworkers at the time had then decided to try the baton on _himself_ , on a too-high setting, and had ended up on the floor with blisters all over his hand. There had been a lot of masturbation jokes.

Holman leans forward a little, trying to be unobtrusive by pretending that he’s just resting against the cabin wall, and finally gets a look at the soldier.

This, too, is anticlimactic: nothing really looks that different from the last time he’d seen him, except of course that the soldier is fully dressed and has one hand on a rifle that is propped barrel-down against the cabin floor. An HK416, by the looks of it, and usually Holman would be excited to get close enough to see what accessories HYDRA has seen fit to mount to it for this mission, but today that all seems unsubstantial.

The soldier doesn’t move much.  _In power-saving mode_ , he thinks, before realizing how ridiculous that is. After about ten minutes, the commander turns to him and says something and the soldier nods, and to pass the time Holman decides to count how often any exchange of words happens between them. When it becomes clear that this game is not going to ease his boredom at all, he decides to switch to a count of how often the soldier moves at all.

The remainder of the flight is ninety minutes long. It happens twice.

He struggles to fight back the feeling that is starting to settle in his stomach. He’d been so happy about this; he _should_ be happy about being here doing something so exciting, but he can’t stop thinking that maybe this will be _it_ , he will just be awkward and excluded for 48 hours and then he will get dumped back at his lab job because they found him so boring. Perhaps he will be paired up with blister guy.

Once the flight is over, though, that changes.

In the van, Rumlow invites him to sit next to him, and he is so surprised that he almost trips over his own feet getting into the seat. The commander smiles at him as Abrams starts the van, a weird tight smile but a smile nonetheless, and begins to ask him questions about his life.

Holman is so grateful for the attention that he tells him everything: his time in school, the reason he’d left, his family, the places he grew up, the stuff he likes about his job, the stuff he doesn’t like. It’s only halfway through the trip that he realizes that Rumlow has arranged it so that he now knows everything about him, that everyone else in the van had probably heard all of it too, whereas Holman is still in the dark about everything except their first and last names—and with the soldier, not even that.

He should feel violated, but it’s hard to care as much as he should. Holman is a boring person! The only real dark secret he has is the one he shares with everyone else in the team.

It’s dark when they finally arrive, past a hidden perimeter and toward a building that is not what he expects: a house that looks like the one his parents live in, old and moderately respectable but not large, a detached garage off to one side, both buildings surrounded by trees. The soldier checks inside first, and then Holman follows Rumlow in. The interior of the house is freezing, and turning up the thermostat does nothing. He had never guessed that Georgia could get so cold.

The commander says something about the basement to the soldier, who disappears in the direction of the back of the house, and then he starts giving orders. “Kohler, do a sweep outside, check the perimeter and make sure the sensors are still working. Do it well, we’re fucked if this place is compromised. Abrams, gear check. Use the garage; I don’t want something blowing up in the kitchen and killing everyone like what happened to those STRIKE-reject chucklefucks in June. Holman, I don’t trust you with anything that can shoot yet. See if you can do something about the heat in this fucking place. You—” and by _you_ he must mean the soldier, but Rumlow is looking just over Holman’s shoulder, and the soldier is still checking something in the basement; Holman had seen him go and hadn’t heard him come back, and _oh jesus he’s there how the hell does he move so quiet_ “—come set up with me.”

In front of Holman, Kohler makes a loud noise of complaint when he hears the last of these job allocations, the first indication that he is not the entirely stoic soldier of fortune Holman had first taken him to be. “ _I’m_ doing the check outside? What did we bring that for, then?” He jabs at the same spot just beyond Holman’s shoulder.

Rude, Holman thinks.

“The soldier is setting up with me,” Rumlow says. He looks tired, as if this is a subject they have hashed out many times before, but he still speaks if the outburst is no big deal, as if it’s too petty to even acknowledge. Holman just can’t help liking him.

Getting the heat going is simple: he just has to turn on the old furnace in the basement and check the pilot, but then he loiters in front of the machine so that when he goes back up it will look like he has done something complicated. The basement is small, and damp, and mostly empty, and something about the noise down here is—off. There’s a low human sound under the loud hum of the furnace, and it’s not coming from above his head. He steps toward the rear wall, toward the place where a large tool chest is sitting right next to the wall there, and the light is especially weird here because—

It takes him a second to notice the low door set into the rear wall. The light back here is shadowy and the door blends in so well with the wall around it that it’s almost invisible, even though it’s partially open; it has been propped open with a piece of wood. The tool chest has been pushed in front of the propped-open door.

Something that sounds like a human voice is coming from inside that door, and he leans closer to look. Surely they wouldn’t have sent him down here with a partially open door if it was something that he wasn’t allowed to see. The interior leads away into a low tunnel, and finally he understands.

The garage. A tunnel means that anyone can get back and forth to the detached garage without being observed from the outside, and more importantly, supplies a hidden escape route if anyone is trapped in the house. Maybe it even goes further than that. The commander must have sent the soldier down before to open the door a little so that it will be easy to find if they need to clear out. The tool chest prevents anyone from being able to get in from outside without making a lot of noise.

That is so fucking cool.

He peeks inside a little further, as far as he can without moving the heavy chest. Whatever door at the other end of the tunnel that leads out to the garage must be open now as well, since he can hear the voices of two men. He can just make out what’s being said, because the person talking right now is doing it very loudly.

“… you know what it’s like?” the voice says. It’s Kohler, the bigger guy. He must have finished his sweep outside already. “Did you ever have to go through one of those fucking things when you’re making a phone call, where you get this robot voice and you have to keep pressing numbers and jumping through these stupid hoops, and no matter what you do you can’t reach a human?”

“A phone tree,” Abrams replies. His voice is softer, and there is a soft thud and then a shuffling noise: he is working on something as he listens.

“That’s it. It’s like taking orders in the field from a fucking phone tree.”

Another thud, and a pause. He gets the impression that Abrams is not actually listening much. “At least it’s not for long, right?”

“That’s easy for you to say. You get to sit in the car the whole time and—”

“Did you hear that?” Abrams interrupts him. The noises stop.

“It’s just the kid in the basement,” Kohler says, and Holman realizes that Kohler had probably been aware that he was there this whole time.

He withdraws, blushing although there is no one there to see it, and heads back up the stairs. As the embarrassment of being caught fades, he wonders what exactly Kohler was talking about. As far as he knows, the only one who gives him orders in the field is Rumlow. Kohler is second-in-command, and that is what _second-in-command_ means, isn’t it? And how did any of it relate to a phone tree?

Back up on the first floor, he double-checks that the heat is indeed working. The house is still freezing, but stale-smelling warm air is flowing out of the floor vents, and so he asks the commander if there’s anything else he should do.

“Go lie down,” he says. He is unpacking something on a table in the living room. “There’s food and bottles in the kitchen. Have a drink, jerk off, whatever you need to do. Just stay out of the way.”

He says it nicely, though.

Holman eats, and then takes one of the folded blankets that’s sitting in a pile by the bags. The living room takes up two thirds of this floor. There’s just a short corridor at one end with a kitchen on one side, and a bathroom and stairs and a door to the basement on the other. The room is missing most of the comfortable furniture you should find in a space like this: all that’s left is a couple of broken-looking armchairs, a bench along one wall, and then the big table in one corner that Rumlow is standing next to. The chairs that would usually go around that table have been moved back against another wall.

There must be bedrooms upstairs, of course, but he doesn’t know if he’s supposed to go up there yet or how he’d be expected to choose a room, so instead he picks a corner with an armchair—the most comfortable surface in view—and sits back in that and tries not to get in the way. Across the room, Rumlow has laid out a large flat sheet of paper that looks like blueprints, and several tablets, the screens of which are angled so that Holman can’t see them. After a minute, the soldier joins him and sets down his rifle against the edge of the table, and the two of them start talking.

That’s a surprise. The soldier has technically talked in front of him before, while Holman was working on his arm during his trial period, but that talking had consisted of short answers to questions posed by important-looking men. Barely more than monosyllabic. He’d started to assume that the soldier was always as blank and silent as he had been on the plane.

He strains now to hear the low voices, wishing he’d picked a closer spot to be unobtrusive, but soon realizes that his lack of comprehension isn’t from nerves or fatigue or distance—they are speaking in Russian.

That is _so fucking cool_.

He still eavesdrops. He has nothing else to do. He can’t understand the words, of course, but he finds that Rumlow sometimes drops back into single words or phrases of English when they are deep in conversation: “okay,” “no,” “let’s see,” “huh.” The general tone of the conversation is somewhat comprehensible as well—it starts off flat, businesslike, then gradually rises to the level of a discussion, then to spirited discussion, then to something that is almost an argument, although neither raises his voice. The two men look back and forth at the blueprints and the tablets like they are seeking out more information to corroborate what they’re saying. There is more quiet argument. Then, incredibly, the commander seems to relent.

The soldier _won_.

Rumlow is sighing now. He shrugs, rubs his forehead like he is annoyed. The soldier doesn’t move—he still never moves much—and Holman cannot see much of his face. More talking, quieter now, then another loud sigh from the commander. “Fuck,” he says in English, louder. Then he looks over at Holman, as if suddenly remembering that he is there.

Holman gapes back at him. His eavesdropping his obvious, and this is the second time he’s been caught doing it in one evening. No one had told him he wasn’t supposed to listen in, and he couldn’t understand what they were saying anyway, but nevertheless he feels as if he had taken the commander’s _go jerk off_ comment too seriously and they had walked in on him doing just that.

But Rumlow just smiles. “We’ll let you get some sleep over there,” he says, and then gestures to the soldier, who starts gathering up the items from the table, folding up the maps and blueprints and tucking them into a bag that Rumlow picks up. He turns to leave, heads towards that little corridor, and the soldier picks up his rifle and silently follows. After a moment, the stairs creak. He’s alone.

He is not going to sleep. The others will be in here soon as soon as they’ve finished their important jobs, and they’ll see him sleeping and think he’s lazy. He closes his eyes, but just to rest.

 

* * *

 

 

He wakes up suddenly in the middle of the night, neck sore and fingers and ears still freezing where they’re not covered by the blanket. Something in him tells him not to move. There had been a bang, or some other loud noise that had woken him—the door in the basement wasn’t secure and someone was down there, or someone was sneaking around outside, about to break a window—

He has no weapon, and he _should_ move, but there is nothing he can do but stay here frozen until someone silently takes him out…

A creak upstairs, someone moving over the wood flooring. Then, very faintly, there’s a voice, and then another, and now he is awake enough to identify that one sounds like the commander’s, although the other isn’t loud enough. Whatever loud noise he heard must have come from upstairs as well, or people wouldn’t just be up there talking as if there was nothing amiss. Would they?

As quietly as he can, he takes his glasses from the armrest, where he must have taken them off when he was half-asleep, and shoves them on. There’s enough light coming in from a light on somewhere in the house that he can see that the room looks normal.

The voice continues, and there is another creak and more faint noise, a shift and a soft thud, unidentifiable. He straightens up. Everything down here is silent, and after a minute or two of more soft noises and talking, upstairs goes silent too. Still, he stays tense, ears straining, for what seems like an hour, until finally there is the tiniest creak from the direction of the stairwell—so soft he would not have heard if he hadn’t been alert like this and straining to hear—and then the soldier is there in the black of the hallway.

Holman stares at him, eyes wide, because in the dark like this he looks like something out of a nightmare.

He looks at Holman—he must have seen that Holman was awake before Holman even saw him. He doesn’t look surprised, of course, but he is… completely unmoving, and his head is tilting to the side a little, as if he is recalibrating. The fear Holman had had of the sound that woke him up is gone now, replaced by something worse.

The soldier doesn’t move, and _doesn’t move_ , and something is wrong: Holman thinks back to the stories he had heard about him at the beginning about him going haywire and killing the wrong people, wonders if maybe the soldier remembers him from that hospital room, is going to perceive him as a threat. Holman will be dead before anyone upstairs can even sit up from their bed.

He tries to speak, say something stupid like _it’s me_ , but nothing comes out. And then all of a sudden it’s over.

The soldier’s eyes move over him like he’s nothing more interesting than the furniture he’s sitting on, and then he turns toward the door. His steps are unhurried, and his rifle is not raised. He isn’t down here because of the sound. It’s just another patrol, or a guard shift, or whatever they do at night. He walks past Holman and disappears out the door in utter silence.

Holman takes a breath, and feels stupid for being scared. Twice.

He leans back into the softness of the armchair. So what was the noise? There is no way on Earth the soldier could have made enough noise up there to wake Holman down here. Probably someone else had been doing guard stuff for the earlier part of the night, and had made noise tripping over something going to bed after they switched back with the soldier. It’s kind of nice to know that someone else in the house occasionally messes up a little.

He settles back a little more, wraps himself tight in his blanket. The room is colder from when the soldier had opened the front door.

 

* * *

 

 

“We’re not going today,” Rumlow says when Holman wakes up the next morning. Everyone else is already up and standing around the big table in the living room, except for Kohler, who has pulled out one of the chairs that had been against the wall and is sitting on it.

“They’re pulling us out?” Abrams says. “I thought—”

“No one is pulling us out,” he says, glancing at all of them, even Holman, who is still covered with his blanket. “The soldier told me he thinks it’s better if we wait until Friday morning to penetrate the building. 48 hours away.”

Holman is freezing. His face hurts: he’d fallen back asleep with his glasses still on and they have been pressing into the side of his face. The bench running along the wall near the table runs over one of the heating vents, and he tries to sidle over to it without drawing attention to the fact that he slept in. No one looks up as he moves, not even the soldier, and he is embarrassed now that he remembers how scared he’d been last night. What had _that_ been about?

He’s so preoccupied with getting warmer and not drawing attention to himself that he is almost at the bench by the time the commander’s words actually sink in. 48 hours from now? The whole _mission_ was supposed to be 48 hours, including flights.

He’s not the only one who has questions. Kohler makes a face like he’s just bitten into something rotten and says: “The asset thinks that? Well then, of _course_ we should do what _it_ says.”

Rude, Holman thinks again. The soldier is standing right there at the table, next to and slightly behind Rumlow like he’s the commander's personal bodyguard, his rifle held in patrol-carry. He doesn’t react.

“We do what _I_ say," Rumlow says, "and I am taking his side on this one.”

Kohler snorts. “Course you are,” he mutters, and then there are a couple of words under his breath that Holman doesn’t catch at all. Behind Rumlow, the soldier cocks his head.

Rumlow straightens a little and stares at him: “You going to elaborate on that comment? Come on, let’s share with the group.”

Holman turns to look at the other man. To his surprise, Kohler isn’t holding eye contact.

“Come on,” Rumlow says. “Show-and-tell time. Let’s get _all_ the secrets out there. Kohler? You go first.”

Kohler’s eyes drop and Holman could swear he goes red. He shakes his head.

When Holman looks back to the commander he doesn’t look angry: his eyes are lit up like he is entertained by this puzzling exchange. He doesn’t have much time to think about what the hell that was about, though: Rumlow is already speaking again like nothing had happened. “There’s a delivery service on Friday morning into the target’s estate that we are confident we can successfully infiltrate,” he says. “Shouldn’t be difficult, according to our research. Waiting and doing it this way means we can get around going through the guards.”

“You are aware we can just kill the guards, correct?” Kohler has already recovered from his embarrassment.

“Yes, I am aware of that.” The commander sounds tired now; the enjoyment that was there earlier doesn’t return. “The soldier pointed out the response time of the local authorities to the building is shorter than we accounted for. Here’s the move they made last year.” He jabs at a map Holman can’t see. “We’ve got no one on the inside there, either. I checked.”

“You are aware—”

“Kohler,” he says. “I am aware that we can kill the authorities, too. We did not get where we are today by cutting a swathe through major cities so extensive that they need to hire extra people to dig the mass graves. We work _quietly_ when we can. You need to work on remembering that part before something else shuts you up.”

Kohler shuts up again.

Holman, sitting on the bench, is impressed. He likes the way Rumlow can take sensible input from other people into account, all without letting assholes step all over him. It’s better than most bosses he has had. Maybe there’s a way he can be more like that.

Rumlow keeps talking. The new details of the mission—targeting some rich donor who is too interested in a certain area of infectious disease research—are not important to Holman: his job is still to sit in the van and wait for someone on their side to bleed. Eventually he tries to lean back, only to find that the wall behind him is still freezing. The furnace is still working, but apparently no one put in any insulation when they built the house. This house, despite all the excitement, does kind of suck. No wonder Kohler is angry about sticking around.

“So what are we going to do?” Holman asks after the commander finishes. “Can we go out, or—”

“Yes, we can go out,” Kohler says. “Hit up the news channels, see if we can get on local television. Good idea, techie.”

Rumlow ignores him and turns to Holman. “This is why we always bring a deck of cards.”

 

* * *

 

 

And alcohol, it turns out. They always bring a lot of alcohol.

 

* * *

 

 

By early evening Holman is bored. They have played every card game he knows (not many) and several they had to teach him. They gamble for random objects in the house because Kohler says it’s a jinx to play poker for real prizes without drinking, and Holman points out that if everyone is not drinking then it can’t be a jinx for _everyone_ , because someone has to win, and Kohler just glares at him. Rumlow says they cannot start drinking until evening because Kohler will be so drunk by nightfall that anyone could come in and snap his neck and he wouldn’t even notice.

“Snapped neck would be a fucking blessing,” Kohler mutters, and only Holman hears it. Kohler smiles a lot every time he wins Holman’s stuff. The soldier does a perimeter check every hour and sits on the bench in between, eyes on the front door. He’s so quiet and docile that Holman feels dumber by the minute about his fear during the night. He’d actually think about apologizing if it didn’t mean bringing it up again.

They eat bad food. The sun goes down. Then there is alcohol, finally, and despite all the complaining Holman thinks it tastes much better now that they’ve had to wait for it. He probably hadn’t eaten enough, though, as it’s not long until that mellow glowing feeling settles all through him and he is so happy to be doing this, it’s _so great_.

He doesn’t let it show. They don’t need to know he’s a total lightweight on top of everything else.

They start setting up a new game of poker with the cash they had all been issued in their wallets. Rumlow pours Holman another drink and he hopes he is still sober enough to remember the rules. Abrams shuffles the cards—he’s good at it—as the soldier comes in from doing another perimeter check. He sits down at the bench by the wall, rifle still in his hands, hair hiding his face.

Holman turns in his chair to face him. “Why don’t you come join?”

The soldier looks up. He looks at Holman, then at the commander, then at Holman again, his face blank. Holman gets the idea that he has messed up, that he is not as good at hiding being tipsy as he thought he was.

But Rumlow doesn’t look angry: he just raises his eyebrows slightly. After a second, he gives a nod.

The soldier stands up, moves an empty chair to the table so that it’s next to Holman, and sits down. He carefully rearranges his rifle and sling so that its barrel rests down next to him on the chair, all without breaking muzzle discipline.

Everyone is quiet. Rumlow still has that look on his face, and Kohler has an even worse version of the same look. But Abrams is still shuffling and doesn’t seem to mind, and deals an extra place, and after a minute or two their expressions seem to go back to normal.

“I have no money,” the soldier says quietly, next to him.

“That’s okay,” Holman says. “We have enough in the pot already.”

The atmosphere at the table remains odd, in a way that he can’t quite put his finger on. Everyone starts talking and playing and it _should_ be normal, but Rumlow and Kohler’s voices seem to be _off_ somewhat.

But still, Abrams is acting normal, and by the time Holman has had a few more gulps of his drink everything appears to have settled back down.

He offers the soldier his glass when he’s done.

“No thank you,” he says.

And by the end of the game he thinks he has figured out why everyone was so damn awkward, because _of course_ the soldier wins. It’s poker, for god’s sake, it’s going to be won by the guy who sits there most of the time like a computer that is shutting itself down. When he realizes his mistake he wants to giggle: it should have been so ridiculously obvious! He suppresses the laughter, gathers up the money on the table and pushes it in the soldier’s direction.

“What the hell are you going to use the money for,” Abrams says, but his tone is not unfriendly.

The soldier looks down at the cash in front of him. “Haircut,” he says.

There is silence in the room for a few seconds. Then Kohler says: “Did that thing just make a fucking _joke_?”

Holman starts giggling, and can’t stop. Abrams laughs too. Kohler looks like he wants to kill them, but at that moment even that somehow seems funny as well. Even Rumlow smiles, although the face he is making is still a bit odd.

 

* * *

 

 

The next day Holman wakes up cold and hungover instead of just cold. A whole 24 hours of hungover nothingness spreads ahead of him, and he understands why Kohler had been so pissy. He gets up, drinks water, uses the bathroom, and curls back up in the chair. He doesn’t notice what anyone else is doing.

He wakes up again close to noon. Rumlow, Abrams, and Kohler are at the table, in the middle of a card game that looks far more complicated than poker to his still-hungover brain. They don’t seem to have moved since they ate breakfast there: there’s food wrappers off to one side, plus several half-full bottles: today they seem to have abandoned the rule about not drinking until sunrise. That would be worrying, maybe, if Holman wasn’t clearly the only one who had been majorly affected by the alcohol last night.

He is hungry. He finds food in the kitchen, a half-full box of store-brand Pop Tarts, and pockets a couple of wrapped ones while half-heartedly listening in to the conversation the men are having as they play, but it sounds sports-related again. He really should have read up on that.

Once he’s done, and has used the restroom and splashed water on his face at the sink (no hot water, of course there’s no hot water) he wanders back in. The soldier is sitting on the same bench as last night. Holman sits down next to him. He is not drunk and overly bold anymore, so this time he leaves a respectable distance between them. The wall, somehow, is still cold.

The others continue with their game. Rumlow looks up once and nods at him, but that is all. He doesn’t want to join in anyway; his head is still not right and what if they pour him another drink? He’ll be dead of alcohol poisoning by nightfall.

It’s so quiet over here, though. The soldier doesn’t move, still holding the rifle. He wonders if that thing gets heavy when you have to hold it for so long every day, but then when you have a metal arm maybe it doesn’t matter.

“You did good last night,” he says finally, in his best starting-a-conversation tone.

The soldier looks at him, but doesn’t answer.

“Have you played much before?”

He just looks at him silently again, and man, that was probably an _extremely_ rude question. Of course he wouldn’t remember how much he has played before.

Holman goes red.

“I think I have,” the soldier says finally, deliberately, as if he really is trying to remember.

He unwraps one of the fake Pop Tarts and takes a bite. Has the weird desire to offer the soldier some food, but that is dumb. He must have had his own already. “Hey, teach me some Russian!” he says. He blurts the words out suddenly, full of the joy of having finally found something less awkward to talk about.

The soldier looks at him, straightening up a little although he’d already been sitting straight. He must take Holman’s attempt to end the silence between them as an order, because he doesn’t smile or ask if Holman is sure; he just begins, _relentlessly_.

( _And what does that mean does it mean he takes orders from me who the hell takes orders from_ me)

Holman is not sure how he feels about that at all, but it doesn’t matter; they have something to do now, and it is something to think about that isn’t his aching head or his stomach on two days of terrible food. The soldier teaches language the way you might teach someone to swim when the boat you’re on is already sinking. He drills ten phrases, feints like he’s moving on to the next ten, then circles back and tests an earlier phrase chosen at random, checking that Holman has remembered. _Where are you going. Go left. Go right. How many are there._

Hire this man to come to his house and he’d be fluent in a month.

_Are you okay. Does it hurt. Do you need to use the bathroom._

“Are these things they ask you often?”

The soldier looks confused. Holman doesn’t press the question.

 _Go that way. Left. Right. Above. Below._ _Alive. Dead. Up. Down._ Then back. _Are you okay_.

Damn, what is “are you okay”? Holman frowns, trying to remember. Ты в порядке. _Are you okay_ is Ты в порядке. He is not completely hopeless at this.

He says the words, tries to repeat them the way the soldier had spoken before.

“No,” the soldier says. “Your _T_ is wrong. The sound.”

Holman tries to say it again, and for some reason he’s nervous. He wants to laugh with embarrassment.

“Still so wrong. And your _R_ is always wrong. Americans always have such problems with the R.”

That’s a weird thing for him to say: Holman has noticed that the words the soldier uses are sometimes a little off, in a way he can’t really nail down, but he _sounds_ American: his accent is so flawless it is like it belongs to a native speaker. But it would be rude to ask anything about that, and probably highly classified as well, so Holman just tries the phrase again. This time, he bursts out laughing halfway through.

“No, no, no,” the soldier says, and Holman almost misses what happens next because the soldier never looks at him directly and his hair hides so much of his face, but he sees it: past the hair, the edges of the soldier’s mouth tug upwards.

He’s smiling.

He stops his own laughter. The sight is intoxicating.

Not because he is remotely interested in the other man in that way—he is not. It’s because the sight is so far from what he has seen so far, so far from anything he had expected, and _Holman had been the one to cause it._ It is like the feeling of a broken machine coming to life under your hands when everyone else has tried to fix it and failed, or the cat at a friend’s house, who hates every human it’s ever met, choosing to come up and sit on your lap.

If Holman can get the soldier to smile, maybe he is _not_ going to be the useless outsider. Maybe he is going to be okay.

It only lasts a moment. Then the soldier nods, and stands up. “Patrol,” he says.

At the table, the others move on from their game and one by one go to scrounge for food in the kitchen. For a while there’s a discussion going on in there, and then Abrams leaves for a while and appears to be doing another gear check. The soldier sits with Holman again. No one pays them a lot of attention: Rumlow looks over at him a few times like he is concerned, as if he thinks Holman’s safety might be in danger, but even that lack of confidence doesn’t bother him much. The fear he’d had in the middle of the first night is a world away, as are most of his worries. He is having a good day.

Around five in the evening, when he is in the kitchen trying to find the least unappetizing thing he can to eat for dinner, Abrams pauses next to him and tilts his head towards the table in the living room. “Want to go another round of poker? No one has any money, but we found some more stuff in the house.”

Holman agrees and sits down with them. The pot tonight consists of several bars of soap, a used mousetrap, and some metal knives and forks. Abrams pours him another drink, but he barely needs it: he’s already feeling warm and fuzzy again. He might have been away from the others all day, but a part of him already belongs. He has not messed up bad enough yet that they’re excluding him. When he compares this to the way they treated him on the plane, he’s ecstatic.

The soldier comes back from another check just as Rumlow is standing up to get another bottle from the kitchen. He starts to head towards the bench and then pauses, looking at the table and then at the commander in front of him and then the bench. He seems confused. Holman can’t stand to see it, not when he’s feeling so good.

“Come back in,” Holman says. “You’ve already won all our money anyway.”

Abrams laughs. The soldier lowers his rifle so that its weight is resting on the sling around his shoulder rather than on his hands, but otherwise doesn’t move. Rumlow is making his way around the table.

“Come on,” Holman says again.

The soldier looks at him, then takes a step forward, and that is as far as he gets before the commander’s fist smashes into his face.

It’s hard, loud, sudden, and the soldier steps back and already there is blood _everywhere_ , and then there’s half a second where the soldier _reacts_ , hands twitching forward like he is going for his gun, but he doesn’t and Rumlow is already bearing down on him, a loud backhand across his face and the soldier drops to his knees like he is praying and the commander says: “Not a fucking word, do you hear me?”

The soldier doesn’t make a noise, hadn’t made a noise even before Rumlow had said that. He is staring at the floor in front of him. His hair is covering his face. Holman can’t move; this can’t be real, the last ten seconds have all been some awful hallucination—

But it is real; he knows this because right then he becomes aware of a noise beside him, and it’s a noise that he would never have dreamed up on his own.

Kohler is laughing.

Everything feels cold. He can’t think, all he can do is look back to where the soldier is slumped dripping blood onto the floor, and above him Rumlow is massaging his hand, and then he looks at Holman, who feels the rest of the blood drain from his face.

“He doesn’t play with us,” Rumlow says. “You understand?”

Holman nods, and immediately hates himself for it.

Rumlow seems satisfied his hand is not injured. He grasps the soldier by the hair and says: “Get the fuck up. Go sit down on your bench.”

The soldier does it. He hasn’t wiped at the blood on his face, and it keeps dripping on the floor, leaving a little trail, and Holman’s disbelief is turning slowly into stunned anger, and that blood; he has to—

He sets his jaw, and stands up. “I want to talk,” he says, and it comes out higher in pitch than he wanted to, but it _comes out_ , and that is the important part. Maybe he will get punched as well, but at least he will have tried.

He doesn’t get punched. The commander looks visibly annoyed, jaw clenching, but then raises his eyebrows and says. “All right then. Come with me.”

Holman stops to drain his drink first.

He follows the other man to the bathroom, and usually it would be hard to have a serious discussion while standing next to a toilet, but he is so furious he doesn’t care.

“What the hell was that about?” he says, and maybe Rumlow will hit him or fire him or just kill him on the spot, but right now he doesn’t care, it’s not _fair_ what he just did. He had thought that he was different, that he would never do do petty shit like this. He had lost an _argument_ to the soldier, and now he is upset about _this_ , it doesn’t make sense. and furthermore he’s almost acting like it’s Holman’s fault—

“ _What the hell was that about_ ,” Rumlow repeats, and his voice is calmer than the words. “What the hell have _you_ been doing? You best buddies with the Winter Soldier now?”

“I just—”

He steps forward, cutting him off, making Holman unconsciously takes a step back. “Listen to me, you dumb shit. Did you ever think about what happens if that thing decides it’s one of us? Starts thinking about whether it wants to follow orders or not? What’s going to happen if he does that, out in the field? You think about that?”

Holman shrinks a little. The edge of the sink is digging into his lower back, and Rumlow is so close he can smell the alcohol on his breath. “ _You_ were talking to him,” he says, and it comes out childish but it’s _true_ , he’d seen him do it first. “You let him change the whole mission. You—”

“I _know_ him,” he says. “He knows his place around me. I am able to compartmentalize. Because I am a _professional_.”

“I was just trying to be nice. You—you were nice to me, and that worked fine.”

“ _You_ signed up for this, kid. You’re here _willingly_.”

Holman is confused and he doesn’t like thinking about exactly what that means, so he just shakes his head. “He won’t even remember. He hasn’t acted out so far, and he won’t even _remember_ , so what’s the harm in—”

“He remembers,” he hisses, and Holman wishes he could shrink back further. The other man is uncomfortably close. “He doesn’t know why he remembers, but he does. You think he doesn’t know me when he sees me? He respects me, even if he doesn’t remember me putting that respect into him. That respect—” he drops his voice—“that _respect_ is the only thing standing in the way of that dumb creature’s metal hand crushing your head so bad you’ve got fucking brain matter spurting out of your eye sockets. That is not me being imaginative, just so you know. That’s something I saw happen. So if you go fucking this up—”

He stops, catching the look on Holman’s face, and shakes his head.

“Kid,” he says. “You’re valuable, and you are new, so we’ve all been giving you space to work your stupid shit out. But you don’t walk into the lion exhibition at the zoo and start telling the zookeeper how to do his job. You don’t go in and tell him to be _nicer_ to the lions.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that. Rumlow shakes his head and steps back, like he has decided that it’s not worth trying to explain. “Just go back out there and shut the fuck up, and don’t say a word to the soldier again unless it is medically necessary. You understand?”

Holman nods automatically without meeting his eye. Rumlow steps back again so that Holman once again has something resembling personal space. He lets out a breath. It’s horrible, this is all really horrible, but some part of him is relieved that asking to talk to Rumlow hadn’t ended _that_ terribly, by HYDRA standards: no one had been maimed.

He goes to move, and the commander grabs his arm as he tries to pass.

“Look up at me,” he says.

Holman does.

He speaks quietly, calm, looking directly into his eyes and it’s like looking into a very dark room. “I’ve killed men for less than this, kid.”

Holman swallows. By the time he is at the door he can feel his own hands shaking.

Kohler and Abrams are still at the table, and break off their conversation when he comes in. The soldier is still sitting on the bench. His nose has stopped bleeding, but Holman can see the sheen of wet blood down the front of his dark clothing. More blood covering the the bottom half of his face, but he doesn’t look hurt or angry. Just slightly confused, as if he is in the middle of a difficult crossword puzzle.

Holman makes it to the table. His head is spinning with everything that has just happened: zookeepers and splattering brains and that face above him that had gone so dark and cold and—

He sits down. They’ve already poured him another drink. Dimly, he hears the faucet going in the bathroom that he just came out of.

Rumlow appears a minute later. In one hand he’s holding a hand towel that had been hanging up in the bathroom: the only towel of any kind that had been in there, in fact, and of questionable cleanliness. He’s soaked it in water from the sink. His other hand is on the baton at his hip. He heads to the bench where the soldier is sitting, and makes the tiniest motion with his head, and the soldier stands up. Holman cringes, hands gripping the edge of the table. But…

“Here,” Rumlow says. He lets go of the baton, and presses the wet towel against the bottom half of the soldier’s face, wiping at the blood. The soldier lifts his chin to make the action easier for him, and the commander wipes at the man’s neck and dabs at the front of his clothing in a way that, bizarrely and completely inappropriately, reminds Holman of his mother. Next Rumlow gently slips the rifle’s sling up over the other man’s shoulder and head, sets the gun down on the bench, then goes back to clean off the smear of blood that had caught underneath the fabric of the sling. For a second his hand rubs across the skin there like he is checking it’s clean, and then he stops.

It is over now. It must definitely be over. It’s—

Rumlow looks up at Holman again, eyes glittering, his face alive with something dark, and something in Holman’s stomach twists.

The commander moves and sets the towel down on the edge of the table, bloodied side up, and beckons the soldier to come toward him, and then points down at the floor. The soldier kneels, and Rumlow puts his hand back on the baton. He pulls it out, extends it, moves his thumb over the edge of it: he is adjusting the setting.

 _No_ , Holman thinks, _no, you already talked to me you already made your point everyone saw already you already made your point_

But he doesn’t say any of this out loud. He doesn’t even try. Arguing will make it worse. If Holman hadn’t argued in the first place this wouldn’t be happening; Rumlow would not be insisting on driving home this lesson.

So all Holman does is press his hands helplessly into the wooden surface of the table as the baton comes down to press against the soldier’s chest and sparks to life.

It’s loud. The only one who makes a noise is Holman—a little strangled cry that escapes from his throat. The soldier just winces, baring his teeth. The commander raises the baton an inch and then presses it down, and then again, like a bored kid poking at a dead animal. Holman doesn’t make another noise. Neither does the soldier, although his hands clench into fists at his sides. Kohler laughs again, and Holman hates him.

Rumlow looks up, and again Holman thinks _maybe it’s over_ but then he raises the baton, moves it up to the soldier’s shoulder level. With his other hand he grips his hair to pull his head up and back. Holman winces and digs his nails deeper into the surface of the table as Rumlow presses the baton against the skin right beneath the other man’s jaw, just under his ear, and then leaves it there.

The baton keeps going. The soldier moans through his teeth.

Holman is shaking, feels sweat pricking on his skin. _Not fair I was the one who argued not fair I would have done what you said anyway I was scared I was scared I was scared_

Rumlow doesn’t stop and doesn’t stop, not until the soldier’s mouth finally drops open and he _yells_ , and the room is full of the smell of burning meat, and Holman wants to throw up—

The commander lets go and the soldier slumps forward. He’s still moving though, breathing heavily like he’s trying to calm himself, and then his whole body _jerks_ like it’s been shocked again, jerks the same way Holman had seen it do in the hospital bed. His metal hand is bracing against the floor like he is about to push himself up.

Rumlow takes a step back, putting distance between them, holding the baton out steady in front of him. He takes a few steps like that, circling, keeping his distance, like a man working up to seize a dangerous animal, baton extended like a dogcatcher’s collar, and Holman thinks _zookeeper_ and for a moment he almost hopes that the soldier _will_ move, will use that metal arm to—

But he just stays like that, his head lowered, the heavy breaths in and out gradually calming and hand losing its tension against the floor, and after a few more dragging seconds, Rumlow lowers the baton. The room is silent.

Rumlow cracks his neck. Whatever danger has just passed doesn’t seem to have frightened him; in fact, he looks like he’s on a high. He says something, quiet, in Russian, and after a few seconds the soldier answers, quieter. His head is still down.

Rumlow raises his head then, looks up at the others, and apparently the look on Holman’s face satisfies whatever he had been hoping to achieve. His smile broadens. It’s horrible. He steps forward and nudges the side of the soldier’s leg with the toe of his boot. A second passes, and then the soldier stands.

“Abrams,” Rumlow says, “make sure you burn that towel with the other trash before we leave. Plus anything else that’s got his blood on it by then. No one else gets their hands on that blood.”

Abrams makes an _aye aye captain_ gesture, as if this is a completely normal request. The commander beckons the soldier with his head again, and this time there is no pause: he just follows him out of the room, trailing him like a wounded dog, and Rumlow _has_ to be leading him somewhere now in order to treat the burn he just put on him, that or just to yell at him like he’d yelled at Holman. He can’t be punishing him any more, that isn’t _right_ , he’s hurt him too much already…

The soft sound of the heat going in the room is very loud now. They sit in silence. Holman is itchy from sweating so much. After a minute, Abrams mumbles something about going to bed, stands up, and grabs a bottle on his way out. Holman is alone with Kohler.

Kohler had laughed. Kohler had seen all that happening and he had fucking _laughed_. Kohler is last on his list of people he wants to be around right now. But he can’t move.

“Chin up, kid,” Kohler says. “He’ll forgive you. He’s a reasonable man.”

It takes Holman a minute to work out that by _he,_ Kohler means Rumlow. Kohler thinks that Holman is concerned about _himself,_ about whether he’s still in trouble with the commander.

He looks up at the other man, frowning. “I’m not worried about me.”

Kohler glances around the room, and it takes him a moment to alight on what he thinks Holman is referring to. “Oh, the asset? It’s not damaged, kid. It’ll perform fine tomorrow. The commander knows what he’s doing. He doesn’t fuck up the equipment the night before a mission.”

If getting up and shaking the man would not have certainly resulted in his own immediate painful death, Holman would do it now. Maybe it’s petty and the least of his troubles but he _hates_ the way he says _it_. He’d seen enough procedures during his training sessions on the soldier’s arm to know for a fact that he is definitely a human male. And apart from that, it’s just…

He doesn’t follow the thought, though. There is something he needs to know. “Why—why did you let me?”

Kohler stares back at him, confused.

“Why did you let me invite the soldier to play poker last night, if it’s not allowed? If it was such a bad thing to do? Why did you go along with it?”

He picks up his glass to take a drink. “To tell the truth, kid, I thought you were playing a prank.”

“A prank?”

“Prank, you know, a trick,” he says, and gulps down some more. “You know, invite it to join in with something, and then wait until it sits down and it’s off guard, and then—I don’t know, hit it, slam its head down on the table or something.” He shrugs. “I figured you would think of something creative. You’re the smart one, aren’t you?”

Holman tries to answer, but the words aren’t quite coming together in his head yet.

“I got it to stand outside all night in the snow once,” Kohler goes on wistfully, smiling a little. “Higher ups were out, and I told it some retarded story, said that it had to wait for my specific permission to come back inside. A couple of new kids were there back then too, and they kept saying for sure that it’d come back in, so I bet them some good money that I could get it to stay out there even after I went out there and threw water on it. You should have seen…”

He stops there, trailing off, apparently confused about why Holman is not finding this hilarious.

“Why?” Holman asks. “Why on earth would you _do_ that?”

He pauses, like he can’t comprehend the question, and then starts to talk slightly slower than usual, as if he is speaking to a small child. “Because it’s _funny_. Because that thing is so—fucking—dumb. It falls for it every. Time.”

“Of course he falls for it every time. He doesn’t _remember_.”

“So there’s no harm in it!” Kohler raises his glass like he’s giving a toast, then shrugs. “Doesn’t even hurt it that much anyway. It always gets better, the freak.”

Holman looks down at the surface of the table and tries to breathe around the weight in his chest. He can’t talk, can’t answer. He _hates_ this. Hates the way it reminds him of his own years in high school, turned up by a factor of ten. Hates that he doesn’t understand why people can be so cruel. Hates the way it’s so _pointless_. HYDRA is supposed to be about order. You had to do bad things to get order, sometimes; you had to make harsh choices that the likes of SHIELD couldn’t stomach, and you had to forgive bad things for the sake of doing your job—but this? What did this _achieve?_

He hates that this is apparently just the way of doing things among so many of HYDRA’s men, which makes him wonder just how badly he had misunderstood the organization in the first place.

“I don’t…” he finally manages to stutter out. “I couldn’t ever… treat someone like that…”

“It’s not _like_ us. It is a dumb fucking _animal_ ,” Kohler says, and Holman thinks that perhaps it’s about bonding, pushing someone out so you can be more certain about fitting in. Perhaps that is why he doesn’t understand. He can’t imagine ever being certain about fitting in.

And then he stops thinking, because Kohler starts talking again, and Holman sinks into his chair, and everything is suddenly so faint and far away: Kohler is telling him another story, one he apparently thinks is even funnier. It’s about another time years back when he had convinced the soldier to come and watch a video back at the headquarters, and the soldier had agreed, and they had gotten him in the room, and the video—arranged by Kohler, but with help—had turned out to be footage that an archivist had found while they were sorting and digitalizing old files. And it was from back in the seventies, and there were five doctors, three men and two women, all Russian, all in white coats, and those people were _documenting_ that shit already, way back in the _seventies_ , and they had the asset strapped down to the table and they had its arm and they were—

Holman feels so cold. He feels colder than he has ever been in his life. The heater is so loud and he is so cold. He needs to move and he can’t.

“And it was watching the screen, and just _smiling_ , can you believe it, it’s like one of those animals that can’t recognize itself in a mirror…”

“Maybe he was smiling because he didn’t know what else to do.” Holman’s mouth is dry. It’s hard to speak. “Maybe he saw you were smiling, and he wanted to fit in.”

Kohler shrugs. His glass is empty now, so he picks up Abrams’.

“Maybe,” Holman continues, “you’re just pissed because you know the soldier is always going to be better at what you do than _you_ are. That you have to work for him.”

Silence. The words had come from nowhere: apparently Holman’s brain has decided that he hasn’t almost gotten himself beaten or killed enough today.

But Kohler doesn’t rise to the bait and get angry; instead he just frowns and looks into the distance, as if he is actually considering the merits of the statement. It gives Holman longer to panic.

Finally he lowers the glass. “That thing you said, about fitting in, kid,” he says. “Maybe _you_ should take a page from that book as well. Before it’s too late.”

Hohler can feel the sweat cooling on his skin.

Kohler smiles again, and tilts the glass in his direction. “Hail HYDRA.”

He doesn’t reply.

 


	2. Chapter 2

The next morning is the mission, and Holman goes into it on two hours of sleep and a stress headache that won’t go away and a sick tightness in his throat that feels like it will be there forever. The worst part is that nobody else acts like anything is amiss. Abrams is cheerful to the point that he seems to have developed selective amnesia. Kohler is just like he always was. The soldier is better already; the burn has faded to an unpleasant-looking dark patch of skin down his jaw and neck. Holman still tries not to look at it.

They wait in the van while Abrams does a final check and cleanup of the house (“you’d just mess it up” he says when Holman reluctantly offers to help) and then they finally depart around dawn and on the way there Rumlow and the soldier keep up a low conversation in two languages in the very back of the van, talking to each other the same way they had on their first evening in the house—planning, comparing, instructing, as if nothing had happened at all the night before, and it’s so eerily _wrong_ that if Holman hadn’t been certain that they didn’t have the gear here to do it, he would have suspected the soldier had been wiped again last night.

How is everybody just _moving on_ after that? How can he possibly be the only one who doesn’t think it’s perfectly acceptable? But apparently he is, and that is the way it is going to be.

 

* * *

 

He worries that his turmoil will make him freeze up and let someone bleed out in front of him, worries about it during the slow hours he and Abrams wait silently in the van, but in the end, the mission goes off without a hitch. Minor scrapes, a laceration in the soldier’s shoulder—the less interesting shoulder—deep, but no real threat. Any field medic could have treated it just as well as he does. Everything is a success.

_(See you idiot no one got hurt the soldier’s plan was good it was a better plan than yours and you burnt him and punched him in the face for it)_

No one is particularly exuberant afterwards. A mission without injuries is apparently accepted as completely normal, nothing but an acceptable day’s work. There are no congratulations. The only sign of any relief or happiness is Kohler talking more spiritedly than usual. The commander’s mood hasn’t changed at all, and Abrams has been quiet all day.

Holman doesn’t mind. A lack of celebration means he doesn’t have to fake anything.

They are back at the landing field within the hour. The soldier is first on the plane when it arrives—checking inside, presumably, but then there is a small holdup while Rumlow and Kohler and the pilot discuss the contents of one of the bags, and finally Abrams just shrugs and shoves past them and climbs in, and Holman follows him.

It’s a different plane, which makes sense: the pilot would have died of dehydration if he’d been waiting for them here all this time. The seating arrangement is different, he is relieved to note: all the rows are forward-facing.

The soldier is standing near the front of the plane, head bent slightly to avoid hitting the cabin ceiling. It’s not until Abrams takes a seat in a middle row and waves his hand and says: “It’s okay, they’ll be a while, sit down,” that Holman realizes that the soldier had been waiting for permission. Now that it is granted, he takes a seat in the front row.

Rumlow would usually sit in that aisle seat next to him, probably. But Rumlow hadn’t said anything about not _sitting near_ the soldier. Before he has time to think about it or back out, Holman sits down in the seat instead.

If the soldier is surprised at this action (or angry, or repulsed, or ecstatic, or _anything_ ), he doesn’t show it.

The decision is a good one, he tells himself as he settles in. Sitting here means he will not risk getting stuck too close to Kohler, who might decide to tell another one of his “funny” stories. He can’t help but tense up a bit as the commander gets on: his decision suddenly seems less brilliant. But it’s too late to move, and he had never said _don’t sit with him_ —

The thought cuts off as Rumlow takes a seat next to Kohler, with barely a glance in Holman’s direction.

Holman exhales. It’s going to be okay.

They take off.

He is exhausted from the tension, but there has been enough in the last twenty-four hours of his life to kill sleep for a week. He thinks this to himself, and then feels awful. It’s terrible to whine internally about his own discomfort right now, considering who he is sitting next to.

He risks a very slow, non-obvious glance at the soldier, whose gaze is fixed on the bulkhead in front of him. He looks no different than he had on the flight here, except for the faint marks still remaining on his neck.

He turns his head in the other direction, looks out of the corner of his eye to try to glimpse what Rumlow is doing without being stupidly obvious about it. Rumlow had taken an aisle seat too, so Holman can just make him out if he pretends to be looking out the window on the opposite side of the plane. The commander’s head is lowered, and he appears to be reading something on a tablet—finishing up paperwork, probably.

He faces forward again. Rumlow had said he shouldn’t talk to the soldier when it _wasn’t medically necessary_. But Holman is the closest thing to a doctor they have here, and it’s up to him to decide when something is medically necessary, isn’t it? The plane is loud, anyway, and no one will hear.

He waits a couple of minutes and then discreetly checks behind him again, though, because the commander’s face from last night is going to be in his nightmares for the next decade. Rumlow is still concentrating on the tablet in his lap.

Holman turns to face forward again, some of the tension finally fading from his shoulders, and then says: “How is the cut on your shoulder?”

The soldier pauses, eyes still on the bulkhead. “No loss of function in the arm.”

“Does it hurt?”

He doesn’t answer.

Holman strains his brain for the phrase he is trying to think of. It’s not easy: his mind has been so preoccupied, and everything that happened before last night seems like it comes from a whole different life. But he finds the words, finally, and he says them out loud.

“Ты в порядке?”

_Are you okay?_

More silence, and perhaps the soldier just isn’t going to talk to him anymore, maybe he’d never even wanted to, maybe Holman is just too—

The voice from beside him is quiet, barely audible over the engine. “You are still getting the _R_ wrong.”

Holman laughs. A bit hysterically, maybe, and he has to control himself so that Rumlow will not see his shoulders shaking, but it’s still better than nothing, and when he finally calms down he swears he can see that the corner of the soldier’s mouth has moved up a little, past the mark on his neck that has faded almost to nothing.

 

* * *

 

The debriefing is over within an hour, and soon Holman is in a room away from the others, surrendering his fake identity and filling out more paperwork. A threatening-looking woman in business clothing checks him over, asks a few more questions (it seems to be a formality in his case; all the _real_ information is with the important people) then hands him a plastic bag with his phone and wallet in it. Holman has needed to pee since before he’d gotten off the plane, and rushes to the first bathroom he can find. The release of pressure in his bladder, while nice, is not nearly as good as the thought that’s been in his head since he stepped back onto solid ground.

_I will be home soon._

He will be home, in his apartment, and he will have a real shower with hot water, and he can wash with his special hypoallergenic unscented body wash, and he can order in food, and then he can sleep in his own bed, alone, with no one around, and no danger, and no one telling him about forcing someone to watch a video of—

No, he _won’t_ think about that video, not now that he’s back here. He doesn’t have to think about it, not now. He dries his face on a piece of paper towel from the dispenser, steps back out into the corridor, and runs straight into Kohler’s chest.

He takes a step back. His glasses have been knocked crooked on his face, but he doesn’t want to move his hand to adjust them. Kohler is still armed, a pistol in his belt holster.

“Commander wants to talk to you,” Kohler says, and he is definitely smirking, and for only a second Holman lets his anger at that smirk blot out his sheer rising terror.

This isn’t right. Everything official has already been done. They let him go. He is supposed to be going home.

But he doesn’t have a choice. Kohler has a gun, and eighty pounds on him. Holman has damp hands and crooked glasses. He follows.

Kohler is silent. It’s a long trip, and with every step it gets worse. They get into an empty elevator, and Kohler speaks and sends them to the floor that isn’t listed; they’re going towards _that_ part of the building, the part Holman had gone to for his training, the part that didn’t exist even within a building that didn’t exist. And _oh god he is so amazingly dumb_ , the commander had _threatened_ him, had said he’d killed men for less, and Holman had just decided to _brush that off_ , had thought that Rumlow wouldn’t notice. How dumb is he? Getting fooled by this man looking down at a tablet?

The elevator stops. If they are going to kill him, why not do it somewhere normal? It’s not like they have anything to hide. Everyone knows that messing up in this organization doesn’t get you a stern talking to and a polite security escort out of the building. No, they would only take him here if they were going to do something worse…

But he doesn’t have a choice. He walks.

They head toward different wing of the floor than the one he had visited before for his training. The whole floor is sparsely populated, but this corridor is completely silent and empty and smells of a cleaning solution. He wants to run but he can’t, and Kohler takes his arm and pulls him towards a door that has been left open a crack.

The first thing he sees is a large storage cabinet against the wall closest to the door, its shelves marked with labels for medical equipment—masks, gowns, scalpels, bandages, swabs. He turns his head: there is an adjustable doctor’s chair in the middle of the room, the type with the foldable back and leg rest that can be moved to switch it to a lying position. It doesn’t have straps. The room looks normal compared to the others he’s seen on this floor; it would have seemed almost harmless if it didn’t also contain the commander and the soldier.

Kohler pushes him forward hard enough for him to stumble, and then stays behind him, blocking the door.

Holman looks at Rumlow—unarmed except for the baton on his belt, except for any hidden weapons he has got on him. The soldier stands next to him, unmoving. He shows no reaction to Holman coming in, pale eyes staring off somewhere near the door. For a moment Holman’s fear is overwhelmed with something more like frustration: the soldier could get _away_ right now, he could easily overpower the other two, armed or not, why is he just standing there—

It only lasts for a moment, though; he’s too busy imagining all the ways this could go from here. His stomach feels like it’s been punched.

Next to the soldier Rumlow smiles. He looks between them and says: “Well here they are, Romeo and Juliet.”

Holman doesn’t move. He wishes Rumlow had used a different example to insult him with, one that didn’t end with everyone dying. He wishes he wasn’t so dense, wishes he hadn’t misjudged Rumlow’s character so drastically. Of course, none of the wishing achieves anything. The commander points to the chair in the middle of the room. “Sit.”

The chair is high, and Holman rests his weight as close to the edge as he can without actually remaining standing. It’s as close as he will come to rebelling.

It doesn’t have straps. It doesn’t need them. He’s not going to move.

“With due respect, sir,” Kohler says from the door, “Why don’t we just—dispose of him? Like we did with Robinson when he—”

“He’s too valuable,” Rumlow says. “I checked the first day we had him. They put in too many training hours already, and his department is undermanned. And it was _Robertson_. You’re remembering names wrong again.” He is speaking to Kohler, but his eyes are on Holman, and he is still smiling and then he reaches out and pats his cheek and Holman wants to dissolve, to fall apart and melt into the floor just so that he is not here. “Our options are limited,” Rumlow goes on. “You know much about the long-term effects head trauma, Kohler? Not everyone heals up like our special boy here.” He is talking about the soldier now, but he is _still_ looking at Holman, and then he is jabbing his index finger painfully against the middle of Holman’s forehead to emphasize every word. “Big—important—brain. Gotta keep that thing running at full power. Isn’t that right?”

Holman’s mouth is too dry. He can’t speak. He thought he had been scared back in that house, talking to Kohler at the poker table. He had thought that was bad. Now he is _here_ —

Rumlow steps back, giving him room, and then says to the soldier: “Undo his pants. Pull them down.”

Holman shrieks, and throws himself back, the sound awful in the room and the back of his shoulders hitting the backrest on the chair with a thud, because he hears these words and has the sudden certainty that they are going to tell the soldier to castrate him.

The laughter in the room takes a long time to go down. He has gotten himself upright again, still backed up against the edge of the chair. His face is burning and he is clutching at his crotch protectively through his pants, terrified.

“Wow,” Kohler says, “that was _great_ ,” and Holman can’t move now as the soldier steps forward. He knows, as clearly as he has ever known anything, that there is nothing he can do, that any further resistance will do nothing but make it worse—it can always be worse. He shrinks back against the edge of the chair and remembers the little label on the cabinet saying SCALPELS and wonders if they had opened that cabinet before he came in. The soldier is in front of him, doing what they say even now—

( _it’s a dumb animal_ )

—doing what they say even though Holman _knows_ that he can talk and plan and act like an actual human, and there hasn’t been enough time for them to have done another wipe on him; he must remember, he must _know_ —

It occurs to him then, clear even in the rough current of his terror, that this punishment, whatever it’s going to be, is not exclusively for Holman. The knowledge does not help. The soldier’s hands are on him, batting Holman’s own hands away as easily as you’d brush away a spider. A stronger man than Holman would resist, would do _something_ , but all he can do is press himself back against the edge of the chair as he feels his belt unbuckled, feels the fabric twist and pull, feels himself exposed. He has never felt so humiliated. Even the hazing had not been as bad as this, it wasn’t people he _knew_ ; even that one awful time in high school wasn’t like this, he hadn’t been sure like he is now that he is about to _hurt_ —

But no scalpel comes out, and neither do any of the knives or other weapons that he knows are hidden on the soldier’s body. Instead, he does exactly as he was told and then stands unmoving, seemingly focused on something on the far wall of the room. Holman’s pants are catching against the front edge of the chair about halfway down his thighs; he can feel every inch of cold air on his exposed skin.

He would close his eyes and switch off but he can’t because he is so confused; he still doesn’t understand what is happening here, why Kohler at the door is smiling but averting his eyes, why Rumlow is grinning like this is the best joke he’s ever heard.

Rumlow must catch the question in his bewildered gaze. He nods and says: “Relax, kid, you’re going to enjoy yourself a lot more than he is,” and then Holman finally, _finally_ understands what this is.

He’s so instantly dumbfounded that he doesn’t have it in him to try to throw himself back again. He would never have considered this, it doesn’t make any _sense_ ; even just holding him down and raping him would make sense, it would be awful and worse than the hazing but it would make _sense_ , this doesn’t—

“No,” he says. The confusion is so strong it has overruled his fear. “No, I can’t—I don’t want to, I’m not, I’m never—”

Kohler, by the door, looks embarrassed, but the commander’s expression doesn’t waver. “Come on, kid. A mouth is a mouth.”

Dimly he realizes that Rumlow must think that he is purely concerned about the homosexual aspect of the act. Rumlow doesn’t understand that it’s _worse_ than that, that _nobody_ has ever done anything like this to him. His most extensive sexual experience had been a quick pity fuck in his last year of high school with a girl who was also in the science club, and that had been unimaginative and over within ten minutes. There had been no one else but his hand ever since. He can’t say that though, it’s too humiliating, and the humiliation is already rising up so steadily that he thinks that if he doesn’t say something he will drown.

“No,” he says, voice faint until he tries again. “ _No_. I’m not doing this. I want to go—I want to talk to someone! This isn’t—”

That is as far as he gets. There is a flash of movement, and noise, and the thing pressing against his stomach is the same stun baton Rumlow had used on the soldier.

It hurts.

He’d known it would hurt but it hurts _so much_ ; the second or two it’s against his stomach is enough to make him spasm like he is trying to curl up, almost slipping sideways off the chair. The pain stops, then starts again, and holds, and he can’t move, can’t think; he feels himself lose control, and if he hadn’t used the bathroom right before he had walked into this hell he would have pissed himself.

The room goes grey and dim. He might be unconscious.

Rumlow is propping him back up, pressing him back up against the edge of the chair as he droops and almost falls and tries to stand; he is sweating and horrified, and the other man has reholstered the baton and is standing next to him, an arm around Holman’s shoulders like they’re buddies. The arm supports some of Holman’s weight, curled around tight, hand gripping strong enough to bruise on his bicep.

He moans. He has no idea how long he was out, how long he’d been completely vulnerable, whether it’s going to happen again. His pants have fallen down further, around his ankles. This is every tiny humiliation in his life rolled into one and he can’t move, and why had he _done_ that, why had he done any of this, all of this for the sake of talking to someone on a _plane_ —

“What are you waiting for.” The voice is close to him; the arm still around him like they’re posing for a friendly photo, but Rumlow isn’t talking to Holman. “Get started already. Your boyfriend’s been wanting this for days.”

The soldier doesn’t move. He is gazing off like there is something interesting on the wall behind them.

“Hey,” Rumlow says, and snaps his fingers. “Come back. I’m talking to you.”

The soldier’s eyes focus on Rumlow. He still doesn’t move. There is no actual defiance on his face, or anger: the most Holman can make out—and his brain is still cloudy so he might be imagining it—is a faint affronted look, as if he’s personally disappointed that everyone is acting this way.

The hand gripping Holman’s bicep moves, shifts, just a quarter of an inch, and he is close enough to feel the tiny change in the commander’s breathing. By the door, Kohler has unholstered his pistol, silently drawing it away from his hip.

The soldier moves his eyes to Holman, then back to Rumlow, and the look of faraway disappointment doesn’t change.

For the first time since he ran into Kohler in the corridor, Holman feels a tendril of hope.

One thing is _definitely_ going to happen, and very very soon. Rumlow is going to yell, and kick, and use his baton again on the soldier. That much is certain. And there are two possible outcomes from that: Kohler and Rumlow overpower the soldier and force him to continue, or the soldier overpowers them. If it’s the latter, Holman knows, there is a very good chance that the soldier won’t stop there, that he will simply _keep going_ , but even that—even that is a better outcome than what he is facing now. As long as he gets a second to pull up his pants before the soldier crushes his skull or punches him through the wall, he’ll die feeling nothing but relief.

Holman stands and waits, waits for the yelling and the hope and the fight that will follow. But none of that happens.

The commander lets go of Holman, but he doesn’t make a move towards the soldier, doesn’t reach for his baton. Instead, he slowly holds up both of his hands, palms facing outwards. He says something, in Russian, and Holman can’t understand it at all, but the tone is—

The tone is—

_Gentle?_

Holman stares at him. The commander’s expression is open, tender, and he keeps speaking softly, half under his breath.

“Хороший мальчик,” he says, “Мой хороший мальчик.”

Rumlow keeps his hands up, palms still open and forward, and takes a tiny step towards the soldier. The soldier does not move, stays immobile with his eyes fixed on Rumlow, like a cornered animal deciding whether to run or lunge forward.

 _“_ Хороший,” he says again and even in his state Holman can dredge up the meaning of that one word that Rumlow keeps repeating.

 _Good_. It means _good_.

Another step forward: Holman _knows_ Rumlow is going to take advantage of this closer position to pull out the baton and strike, and yet still he doesn’t, he just takes another tiny step closer and then moves one of his hands to reach out, slowly, toward the soldier, and then he is—

Petting him.

Holman doesn’t have another word for it. The commander’s hands are moving through the soldier’s hair, gentle, brushing it back from his face and combing his fingers through it, and his other hand comes up to cup his jaw, but softly, thumb brushing tenderly over the soldier’s cheekbone. The soldier’s affronted expression has faded to one of mild confusion, and as Holman watches now it shifts further, his blue eyes losing focus, mouth parting somewhat as he relaxes into the hand stroking his hair.

“Shhhhh,” Rumlow says.

The soldier closes his eyes, mouth dropping open a bit more. The fingers of both of his hands are bending and unbending at his sides.

 _“_ Хороший мальчик,” Rumlow says, as softly as you’d speak to a half-awake baby. “Мой самый дорогой мальчик _.”_

 _No_ , Holman thinks. He has to do something, speak or move while they are distracted, but Kohler is near the door and still has his pistol half-raised and when Holman risks a glance in that direction, he is looking directly at him like he knows what Holman had been thinking. Holman can’t run, can barely move with all the panic and fear still flowing through his body.

He shifts against the chair miserably. He is completely _powerless_ , and when he tries to clear his throat to try to speak up, _say_ something like he’d at least managed to do when they were back at the house, nothing comes out except a soft whine.

Always so weak.

 _“_ Хороший,” Rumlow says again in front of him, and the soldier nods, his expression now close to dreamy, and the petting gradually slows down to nothing. The thumb that had been stroking the soldier’s cheek moves to press down against the edge of his jaw, and then his hand grips tighter.

The soldier opens his eyes and blinks like he’s waking up, and the commander’s hand on his jaw grips even more, fingers pressing down into his skin. The soldier’s eyes focus, meet his.

“ _Down_ ,” Rumlow says in English, his voice stern and loud.

There is just a second longer while Holman can still hold out hope, and then the soldier blinks again and moves slowly down onto his knees.

Holman wants to cry, and it’s worth the last shred of his dignity that he doesn’t.

Rumlow is already back by Holman’s side, wrapping an arm back around him. Holman looks up at the ceiling and bites miserably at the inside of his cheek. He jumps at the feeling of the soldier’s metal hand, shockingly cold against the front of his thigh. Then the soldier’s other hand, the human hand, takes hold of _him_ , and the shock of the contrasting feeling of warmth makes him suck in a loud breath. He hears a laugh.

Holman grits his teeth and tries not to let tears come into his eyes. The room is bright, Rumlow is so close next to him he can smell his aftershave, and he is trying to breathe steadily and not let his breath hitch like he’s crying, and after a minute or two Kohler speaks up from the door and says to the commander: “Huh, look at that. Blame the fear-boner. I guess I owe you five bucks.”

“Told you.”

He snorts. “I was sure he didn’t even _have_ a dick.” Then he turns away, like he’s disgusted.

Holman wants to die. It’s not his fault this is happening, he is _scared_ , and no one has touched him in _years_ , it doesn’t mean he wants this, but as soon as he starts growing in the soldier’s hand it’s like whatever part of his body or his brain that had been holding out until now just folds in on itself and collapses.

This is going to happen. It is terribly, stunningly clear. There is simply no point in resisting now, no way out except through.

He thinks he has at least accepted that, accepted everything, but then the soldier leans forward and he feels warm breath and Holman presses himself uselessly back against the chair and goes nowhere. This is his _first time_ , and that small injury hurts right now more than anything.

The mouth is wet and as warm as the hand and he thinks of the cold skin on the hospital bed and he thinks of his face and he had smiled at him _he had smiled at him—_

The soldier has taken his dick half into his mouth, and the warm press of his hand is sliding back and forth over the rest, tight grip up toward the base and then back toward the mouth that’s enveloping him. The soldier’s other hand still pressed against Holman’s thigh and Holman’s eyes are closed and it just makes everything else he is experiencing stand out more…

“Open your eyes,” Rumlow says and Holman does it before he realizes that Rumlow is not looking at him: he had been talking to the soldier. He squeezes them shut again. He is not strong. He is not brave. But he can get _through_ this, he just has to think about—

“That’s good,” Rumlow says, still with his arm tight around him and too close, voice and breath next to his ear. He’s still talking to the soldier. “Good. Just like I showed you.”

Holman whips his head up to gape at the man next to him, horrified, and his hard-won erection flags. Kohler guffaws from the door. Holman barely hears him.

Back at the house—

Leading the soldier out of the room, telling Holman _We’ll let you get some sleep over there_ —

The noises—

Jesus _Christ._

They had known. The others must have all known. For how long? Had they been laughing at Holman’s amazing failure to grasp simple shit? How could he be so _dumb?_

He feels woozy, like the shot he’d gotten from the baton has just hit its second wind. The chair he’s leaning back against is still barely carrying any of his weight, and his legs feel like they are about to give out, and if that happens it’ll just be Rumlow holding him up and for some reason the idea of that is even more horrifying.

Next to him, the commander’s still talking. “…we’re all in this together, and we have to help each other out,” he is saying to the soldier. “That’s good. We’re all together. Like I told you. Good,” and Holman doesn’t _understand_ any of that, doesn’t get why he won’t shut up—

He closes his eyes again. He will not think of the house and all the things he did not notice there. He will not think. If he stops thinking, it almost feels good, after so many years just with himself, and he has no basis for comparison but the soldier is _good_ at this—

_(Because he has plenty of experience no no don’t think of the house don’t think)_

He makes himself relax, lets his hips start to move just a bit, and ignores the next burst of laughter from the doorway. If he can just make himself finish this it will be _over_ and even if they do worse after, _this_ will be over.

He tries to get a grip on a good fantasy, tries to think of what he’d imagined the last time he had jerked off, but every image and scenario he can grasp keeps slipping from his mind, it’s just the house and the smell of flesh burning and _he’d smiled at him_ …

He shakes his head. They said they were not killing him because of his brain. If his brain is that valuable, he should be able to do this. He can.

He focuses so hard on blocking out what is happening he thinks he might go into a trance. It seems like it would be preferable.

When it _finally_ starts to work, when he starts tilting his hips forward and moving, the soldier helps, moving his tongue and gripping him tight and jerking his hand faster with heavier strokes that drag Holman’s skin back and forth almost enough to be uncomfortable; he’s helping to make this be over quicker—

“Let go,” Rumlow says next to his ear, and it’s still directed down at the soldier. Holman opens his eyes, and when he sees the commander’s expression he realizes that Rumlow is holding him like this not because he thinks he’ll try to escape, but because he likes the view. “No hands anymore,” he says kindly. “Remember how Kohler likes it? Like we showed you.”

The soldier’s body twitches as if he’s been hit, but he follows the order, the strong grip disappearing from the base of Holman’s cock. The metal hand leaves Holman’s thigh as well, and then both of the soldier’s hands are down at his sides. Behind him, at the door, Kohler coughs like he’s embarrassed, shifting his weight.

Holman’s own breath hitches, and he hears himself whine under his breath. That’s enough to ease Kohler’s embarrassment, apparently, because the other two men both laugh again.

He tries to ignore it and steady his breathing. It’s either take the other man’s comfort into consideration or get this over as quickly as possibly for both of them, and it’s not much of a choice. Holman lifts one hand from where it had been gripping the edge of the seat and presses it tentatively against the back of the soldier’s head. Long hair, like a girl. He has to concentrate. He presses further, still gently, fingertips moving against the base of the other man’s skull and tangling in his hair, and the soldier tilts his head so he can take him further down his throat, further—

Don’t think. It’s easier now, physically this feels _amazing_ even though every single part of him wants to die ( _concentrate concentrate_ ) the pressure of the soldier’s hand on his base is gone but instead everything is smooth and so warm, the tongue moving under his cock like a tiny warm animal, and his fingers twist in the soldier’s hair now and the soldier stoops forward and pushes like he’s impaling himself on a knife, and without thinking Holman juts his hips forward to reciprocate the action. He gasps and feels rough stubble and the soft press of lips against the skin of his stomach.

Concentrate. Don’t think. Just warmth, nothingness, the same man drooling in front of him on a hospital bed. Concentrate. Mouth open and tongue so hot against him and a sick wet gagging sound coming from the other man but he’s almost there, it’s almost over—

It’s like teetering on the edge and realizing you are going to fall, realizing there is no hope and everything is over. Holman gives in and falls, the last thrusts too hard and violent until it finally happens, a rush of pleasure so sudden and intense that when it hits him the semi-trance dissolves and he _thinks_ , something in him snaps back to attention and _god he is coming down this person’s_ _throat_ , and he jerks his hips back so that his dick slides out of the other man’s mouth, but all that that achieves is that the last few spurts of his orgasm splatter on the soldier’s chin.

It’s over. It’s over.

His legs are shaking. Sweat is cooling his forehead and between his shoulder blades and under his arms, and he feels like he has just thrown up on a roller coaster, and he is so tired, and that hadn’t even felt that _good_. Of _course_ it hadn’t felt good—but it just seems incredible that he could have so much of a strong physical reaction while his brain feels nothing but pure horror.

The two other men in the room are saying something. He doesn’t bother to listen. Maybe they’ll kill him now after all. That would be nice.

Rumlow takes his arm from around Holman’s shoulder. On the floor in front of them the soldier lifts his flesh hand to wipe his mouth and Rumlow says “Don’t you fucking dare,” and he stops moving.

He says nothing like that to Holman, though, so he grabs his pants and underwear and yanks them up, does up his pants with hands that are starting to shake. His dick feels cold where the spit is drying on it. Next to him, Rumlow steps toward the soldier, takes him by the side of the face. The soldier is looking down at the floor, chin still shiny with the spit he’d drooled out and with the smear of ejaculate. Rumlow tilts his head up, wipes his thumb over that mess, gathering it up, and then pushes the thumb in between the soldier’s lips. Holman winces.

“Clean,” Rumlow says, and the soldier’s cheeks hollow out as he applies suction. The room is so silent Holman can hear the soft click of saliva moving in his mouth.

“Good,” Rumlow tells him and pats the soldier’s cheek with his other hand. The soldier opens his mouth, and Rumlow removes the digit. He spends a few seconds wiping away the tears in the corners of the soldier’s eyes—Holman winces again—and then lets go. Holman dares a glance up to the commander’s face long enough to see that he is biting his lip, his face flushed. “Good,” he says again, voice lower and rougher now, unsteady but not with fear. “You just stay there, baby, we’re still gonna need you to help us just a bit.”

The soldier doesn’t seem to hear. He is moving back and forth very slightly, staring sullenly ahead like he’s not really there anymore, and even though _most_ of the time it seems like he’s not completely there, something about the way he is rocking is so unlike his normal stillness, so _human_ that it makes Holman shudder. His fingers slip where he is still trying to do up his belt as the feeling that had been humming in the background of his mind suddenly hits him at full volume.

Holman could have been more considerate with him, could have been _gentle_ even if he was being forced to do what he’d just done. He could have done so much better; he’d _hurt_ him. The feeling builds up dark and sick in his stomach, and it is exactly like the strange heavy feeling he’d had the night after he first saw the soldier on that hospital bed, only it’s ten times worse, a hundred times worse. It’s so much it feels like it will sweep him away and kill him and he can’t take it, he can’t—

“So how was it?” Rumlow is saying, still speaking to the man kneeling on the floor. Holman turns away from the soldier to look at him, to focus on anything but the awful heaviness that’s trying to batter down his brain. The commander is smiling: the unsteadiness in his voice is gone now, under control like everything is under his control. His tone is gentle, even _sweet_ , the same tone he had used on the soldier before when he spoke in Russian. “You like having your new boyfriend fuck your throat?” he says. “Took it all in, didn’t you? That felt good, huh, sweetheart?”

For a moment the soldier doesn’t react, still rocking back and forth in the corner of Holman’s vision. But then he looks up, hair falling back away from his face so he can make eye contact with the man standing above him. He gazes up at Rumlow for another long moment, and then nods.

“I knew you’d do well,” Rumlow says down to him. The soldier nods again, eyes wide and expression open, _eager_ , and it’s too much and the feeling is too much, and Holman is too—he can’t—

Fuck him. Fuck the soldier. Fuck all of them, but _fuck him_. _Holman_ should have been more considerate? Fuck that—the soldier could have _done_ something. Holman is weak, he had never had a chance at getting away from this right from the start, but the soldier had!

He had been right to feel frustrated at the soldier before; he hadn’t gone far _enough_ when he’d felt frustrated. If the soldier had fought back properly, if he had used his brain—Holman had seen very clearly that he was physically capable of doing both of those things—if he had done _anything_ except followed orders like a fucking trained _animal_ , _neither_ of them would have had to do this. Holman would never have been exposed like this, would not have to spend the rest of his life remembering this shitty experience whenever he jerks off. Would never have been forced to _hurt him_.

The anger is sudden and violent, making him grit his teeth, pushing away everything else in his head. Why is he so stupid, why is the soldier so _stupid_ —

“I guess we’re square now,” the commander says. It’s only when he claps Holman on the shoulder that he realizes that Rumlow’s attention has moved to him. “You’re free to go, Holman. Good work today! Thanks for helping us out.”

Holman stares at him. A part of him knows this shouldn’t be over now, but his head is buzzing and he wants to get away from this anger and this clusterfuck, wants to go home. So he complies, pushing himself away from the table in his rush to move past Rumlow, but he is halted by a hand in the middle of his chest.

He stops, frozen.

The commander is leaning in close, still smiling. “Hail HYDRA,” he says.

Holman gazes past him, focusing on an empty patch of floor. “Hail HYDRA,” he says, and tries to move again.

Rumlow does not move his hand. “You can do better than that.”

“Hail HYDRA,” Holman says again, louder, this time raising his eyes to the older man’s face. And that _still_ doesn’t seem to be enough, so he says it again.

Rumlow drops his hand finally, and Holman stumbles towards the door. Kohler, in front of him, is already stepping away to give him room.

This is it, he is going to get away, this is going to end, he is going to go _home_ , and—

“Wait,” Rumlow says from behind him.

He stops again. It’s automatic. He doesn’t have it in him to do anything else. He hates them all so much. He wants the walls to fall down on them. He wants to cry.

He turns around, slowly, to face the commander again. The man is smiling.

“Pass us one of those scalpels while you’re there, will you,” he says.

Holman is already next to the cabinet; he doesn’t even need to take a step to obey the command. It’s locked, but his keycard is still clipped to his belt, which at least is fastened again. Holman reaches for the card, fingers sweaty, his heart loud in his ears. It works. The cabinet opens.

The scalpels are the disposable type, with the plastic handle already attached to the blade. He reaches at random into a container and takes one: it’s smaller than a pen and wrapped in a sterile package made of clear plastic and light blue backing.

“No,” Rumlow’s voice says from somewhere far away, “a bigger one.”

Holman drops the one he’d been holding, grasps blindly for something bigger, his hands moving over the containers that hold the different sizes. He picks up one from the container that is right at the end, the plastic wrapper crackling under his shaking fingers. Rumlow is smiling in a way that makes Holman never want to see a smile ever again.

“Unwrap it,” Rumlow says.

He unwraps it.

“Now give it to me, kid.”

Behind him, in the corner of Holman’s eye, the soldier is still kneeling on the floor. Holman wants to be _home_ , he wants to be done feeling like this, and this was mostly the soldier’s _fault,_ andhe can't—

Rumlow’s fingers brush against his own when Holman hands the scalpel to him. They feel warm.

“Hail HYDRA,” Rumlow repeats.

“Hail HYDRA,” Holman says back to him.

Kohler steps out of the doorway to let him through for real this time, and Holman is _through_ , he is out of the room, it is all over for him and he can remember the way out.

He is out.

The screaming starts when he is barely halfway down the corridor. It’s sharp, surprised, but still _restrained_ in a way that tells him it doesn’t belong to Rumlow or Kohler or to anyone who expects that their screaming might lead to someone coming to help. It fades almost to nothing, but then rises again, like the desperate suppression attempts have failed.

Holman wants to go faster to get away, but his legs are still weak and shaky and he can’t, so he just puts his hands over his ears. It isn’t enough. The screaming stops again as he’s turning the corner toward the elevator, but then it starts _again_ , worse, and he doesn’t want to hear but it is in his head, and maybe it will _always_ be in his head, and all he can do is repeat, desperately, those last words, the words that will block out the sound until he is out of this building and he is away from everything and he is home.

Hail HYDRA. Hail HYDRA.

“Hail HYDRA,” he says out loud when he reaches the elevator, says it as he swipes his card and waits desperately for the doors to slide open. The screaming is still coming, faintly, from the room he had left. “Hail HYDRA.”

Hail HYDRA.

Hail HYDRA.


End file.
